TAGTeacher Tale: Fun with Studying for a Test

By Jane Jackson

I just had to share a little feedback from some tagging experience today. I tried out my pony part  memorization exercise with a group of 4-6 kids, aged 10-12. One sat with a book with the drawing of a pony (parts labeled) and the tagger. The other four sat across from her and a large chalk drawing of a pony on the barn floor. One of the four would take a turn by looking at chalk drawing and thinking of the name of a part they thought they could find- the various kids had different backgrounds of learning and knew different parts. When she thought of a part, she would tell the tagger girl. That girl would then find the part on the chart in front of her and say '"ok", then the learner would touch the part on the chalk drawing and get tagged if it matched the drawing in the book. After two rounds, the book and tagger got passed to another girl and the previous tagger joined the others. After several rounds of this, we pulled a real pony out of a stall to do it all again.

My feedback quote of the day? This book was "required reading" and all the kids have them. When one of the girls was doing the tagging, she looked down at the book and said "this is really neat- I've never really looked at this before. I should study it". It felt like a victory to me because even though she is one of the ones being tested tomorrow, and knows she should know the parts, she hadn't looked at the chart - until she got to play this game. And that game with the tagger made the chart fun and interesting. The learning was occurring in the girl doing the tagging, not necessarily the others. They were picking parts they already knew....the girl doing the tagging had to find the part on the drawing (visual reference #1), then watch the other girl touch it on the floor chalking (visual reference #2) and then TAG....auditory marker.

I had to pull them away from this to get lunch (yes, pull them away from studying to eat!).


Link to Jane's blog

Link to Bookends Farm

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